Writer/director Isaiah Saxon’s debut feature film The Legend of Ochi premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival to moderate acclaim, despite already having secured a distribution deal from A24. As I was sitting in the theater yesterday before The Legend of Ochi, my theater played trailers for the upcoming live action How to Train Your Dragon and Lilo & Stitch remakes, and as I settled into the plot of Ochi, I began to wonder…are all films aimed at a family-friendly audience sort of about the same thing? And does The Legend of Ochi bring anything new to the table?

In a secluded fictitious Scandinavia-ish village called Carpathia, young Yuri (Helena Zengel) lives on a farm with her eccentric father Maxim (Willem Dafoe) and soft-spoken brother Petro (Finn Wolfhard), after her mother (Emily Watson) mysteriously disappeared years prior. She is told not to go out into the woods at night because of a mysterious group of creatures called the Ochi, that her father has taught her to be fearful of. One evening, she finds an injured baby Ochi and brings it home, at the chagrin of her father. She decides to leave home and embark on an adventure with the Ochi to bring it back to its family.

I’ll start with the good here. The creature design of the Ochi is great. These little creatures are simultaneously adorable and a little creepy. Each generation of children deserves their version of The Dark Crystal – that movie that will gently traumatize them but teach them life lessons, and this will do just that. There’s a Jim Henson quality to the animatronics and puppetry here, and as a viewer you aren’t totally sure when you’re looking at a practical effect and when you’re looking at VFX, and I think that’s a high compliment for this kind of low-budget endeavor. The cinematography from Evan Prosofsky is also pretty terrific, including lots of wide shots of vistas that make you happy you saw this in a movie theater. David Longstreth’s score is also pretty great, although it sometimes feels a little overbearing. 

Where The Legend of Ochi falls short, however, is in the script. I mention the pre-show trailers for other similar movies because they highlight how derivative this all is. Saxon’s screenplay is ripping off so many other movies, and they’ll come to mind as you’re watching it, and unfortunately there isn’t much here to set it apart from the better movies you could be watching instead. And I have no idea if Isaiah Saxon is any good at writing characters or dialogue because every character here is so surface level and there is so little dialogue here. And while I can appreciate the lack of exposition and forcing the audience to actually pay attention, it felt like a lot of the world building here was unfortunately very half-realized.

Willem Dafoe continues his hobby of doing the weird-ass indie projects and more power to him, but his character here feels like Saxon was going for A24 weirdness combined with Wes Anderson quirk and whimsy, and failing to make it work. Child actress Helena Zengel, previously seen alongside Tom Hanks in News of the World, is fine for what the script calls for, but it’s hard to really care about her either. The only character in this movie worth giving a damn about is the animatronic Ochi creature, and it feels a bit cynical that even indie label A24 will soon usher in a new age of merchandising. You can close your eyes and see the plush toys being prepped for the holiday season. 

Also working against The Legend of Ochi is its pointed lack of ideas. Despite its short running time of under 90 minutes, this thing feels endless. The pacing is so bad that, at a number of different points, I had to physically stop myself from checking the time on my phone. A more substantial problem is that Ochi really isn’t doing anything you haven’t seen before in a hundred other movies and it’s not charming enough as a cohesive narrative for you to not care. 

So overall, I was less than impressed with The Legend of Ochi, and it’s a shame, I was really looking forward to this. I’m hoping that some parents take their kids to this and it either turns them into baby cinephiles, or teaches them a valuable lesson about humanity’s relationship with animals and nature, but it’s very possible the younger audience members will also just fall asleep. There’s just not enough here to warrant a trip to the movies and no human characters to root for and also not a lot for viewers to take away from the story emotionally. That little baby Ochi sure is cute, though.